Daryl Davis with a member of the Ku Klux Klan. COURTESY PHOTO The country that created and popularized such seasonal sports games as football, baseball, and basketball, has now created an all-season game, impervious to any type of weather. Its participants are obsessed with playing it seven days per week and twenty-four hours per day. It's called The Blame Game.For the last eight years, anything and everything that was wrong in our country or in our own personal lives was blamed on President Obama. It became so ridiculous that if someone stepped of the sidewalk the wrong way and twisted their ankle, they blamed Obama.Today, while some are still playing the old Obama version, others have moved on to the new Trump version. Ironically, the Donald himself prefers to play the old version which expired on January 20th of this year, and he does so every time he has the opportunity. In fact, it's become addictive for him.What is sad is that the United States, once a very proactive country, leading the world has become complacent and reactive in taking steps to find solutions rather than cast aspersions. Our citizens' reaction has been to blame the country's leaders. There are those who say race relations in America are the worst they've seen and eight years of President Barack Obama is to blame. Others claim that the blame for a rise in extremist hate groups and the violent and deadly event which recently took place in Charlottesville, Va., lies squarely on the shoulders of President Donald Trump.

If you thought the blue lines in hockey were confusing (apologies to MAD Magazine), try spending time in the White House briefing room.While most of the nation wants a health care plan much like the plan congressmen can enjoy, and while hate crimes and anti-Semitism are on the rise, reporters in the White House press briefing room are enduring a never ending epidemic of languageH.L. Menckenwould describe as “wet sponges,” though earlier this week we heard it in the guise of “rainbows and puppies.”What was said? Well it turns out it wasn’t said. Maybe we didn’t understand and it doesn’t matter because there’s something new to say to us any way. Bad hombres are all about.

Brevity can be the soul of wit. However, brevity often proves to be witless and soulless. Hence I’ve never been a fan of Twitter. Last weekend President Donald Trump, riding high after a speech before a joint session of Congress –a speech when at times he waxed philosophical by implying it isn’t too much to dream of our footsteps on alien worlds – shot himself in his foot with a tweet.

There have been a number of lawsuits filed by persons referred to in the press and media as “birthers,” who allege that President Obama was not born in the United States and is therefore ineligible under the U.S. Constitution to be President. While the President’s second term is approaching its end, last week the Maryland Court of Special Appeals addressed such a suit, in a case called Montgomery Blair Sibley v. John Doe.

Let’s talk about Journalism. The Free Press.We media folk recently got a lot of flak for the extensive amount of coverage given to Presidential aspirant Donald Duck Trump.It is estimated the Donald has been the recipient of almost two billion dollars worth of free advertising since he tossed his clown nose in the ring which may or not be true, but for the sake of argument let’s say it is a fact.No less than President Barack Obama recently took the press to task for our infatuation with Donald and all things Trump related.“A job well done is about more than just handing someone a microphone. It is to probe and to question, and to dig deeper, and to demand more. The electorate would be better served if that happened. It would be better served if billions of dollars in free media came with serious accountability,” The President is quoted as saying at a Washington D.C. dinner and in an online Fortune Magazine article.

The second Republican presidential candidates debate, conducted on CNN, focused more on each candidate responding to slights hurled by the other candidates than on what and, more importantly, how the candidates would address the serious issues facing this country. In a nutshell, the debate was more rhetoric with little substance, but a great deal of Ronald Reagan name-dropping and an awful lot of "dump on Trump," the front-runner.